Judith Scott featured in New York Times review of ‘A Rare Earth Magnet’ at Derek Eller Gallery

This is one of those late-summer group shows that can stir optimism about the coming season. And it may be germane that eight of the 11 artists here are women. Organized by Brian Faucette, director of the Derek Eller Gallery and co-owner of his own establishment, the Brooklyn gallery Know More Games, the exhibition concentrates on artists avidly drawn to found materials, recycled objects and strong color, with robust, often tactile results. In a reasonable description of contemporary art, the show’s news release states that widespread digitization and “the canonization of poststudio practices” are creating “a materialist counterculture.”

Helpless in the face of Google’s sundry definitions of the term “rare earth magnet,” I can only take the show’s title poetically, as possibly suggesting the counterculture’s irrevocable attraction to physical stuff. The presiding angel here is the fiber artist Judith Scott (1943-2005), represented by one of her wrapped-yarn sculptures — a soft, irregular mass made from a line — that includes vacuum-cleaner tubing among its multicolored strands. And the influential artist Mike Kelley seems present in spirit, especially in Anna Rosen’s insanely cheerful paintings — flowers and a bright sun — appended with lovingly worn knickknacks that evoke a simpler past.